Bookmarks 2025-13
Art || Design
Wonder-Sighting in the Medieval World, by The Marginalian
Stunning Sixteenth-Century Drawings of Comets, with Carl Sagan’s Poetic Meditation on Their Science
Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?, by The Paris Review
He didn’t publish a book of poems until he was thirty-nine, but went on to win four Pulitzers. By the end of his life, he could fill a stadium for a reading. Frost is still well known, occasionally even beloved, but is significantly more known than he is read.
Career || Programming
Is AI a Silver Bullet?, by Ian Cooper - Staccato Signals
Claims made that LLMs will cause significant changes to software development tested against programming history
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers, by Charity Majors
A software engineer argues against the myth of the “10x engineer”
What Is Analog Computing?, by Quanta Magazine
You don’t need 0s and 1s to perform computations, and in some cases it’s better to avoid them.
Premature optimization, by Alex Ewerlöf Notes
A mental model to detect and prevent optimizing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, or for the wrong reasons
Society || Tech
Reading Strategies for CopingWith Information Overload ca. 1550-1700, by Ann Blair
The “multitude of books” was a subject of wonder and anxiety for authorswho reflected on the scholarly condition in the sixteenth through the eighteenthcenturies. In the preface to his massive project of cataloguing all known booksin the Bibliotheca univeralis (1545) Conrad Gesner complained of that “confusing and harmful abundance of books,” a problem which he called on kingsand princes and the learned to solve.
Are we really prisoners of geography?, by The Guardian
A wave of bestselling authors claim that global affairs are still ultimately governed by the immutable facts of geography – mountains, oceans, rivers, resources. But the world has changed more than they realise.
The Government Knows AGI is Coming, by The Ezra Klein Show
How the US government is preparing for AGI, and all the challenges that remain
Science
The brain undergoes a great “rewiring” after age 40, by Big Think
In the fifth decade of life, our brains start to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated over the ensuing decades.
Maths || Maps
Emma Willard’s Maps of Time, by The Public Domain Review
Susan Schulten explores the pioneering work of Emma Willard (1787–1870), a leading feminist educator whose innovative maps of time laid the groundwork for the charts and graphics of today.
Philosophy || Psycology
Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older, by The Marginalian
Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.That’s what beloved writer Grace Paley (December 11, 1922–August 22, 2007) addresses with extraordinary humor and intellectual elegance in a 1989 piece titled “Upstaging Time”.